David Blamey
D.B.
Until 25th November 2007
Curated by Paul O’Neill
Fourth Floor
11 Burgh Quay
Dublin 2, Ireland
cultural agency.
Continuing his on-going series of pin drawings on fabricated panels, Pin Board 2, (2007) is a scaled-up notice board almost entirely covered with office pins. Upon closer inspection, this mass of colours and sizes registers a multitude of small disparities that stem from the varied geographic sources from which they originate. Blamey states, “If you compare a 1/16″ diameter round head pin manufactured in the US with the same type of thing made in Spain or the UK, you will find differences. Subtle inconsistencies in production values have allowed me to accumulate a range of colour variations and sizes from all over the world that creates, in accumulation, a sense of space.” Through a laborious process of gathering, drawing and building, these works turn on the possibility of transforming commonplace materials into a satiated map of the universe, with so many places, times and points of intersection and (in-) significance. Pin Board 2 remains ambivalently positioned between a commonly employed bulletin board with all its notices removed and the highly crafted embodiment of a contemplative spatial illusion. The effect is one of pleasurable disorientation.
In Road, (2007) row upon row of individually framed watercolours hang in a grid. These paintings by unknown Indian art students were purchased by Blamey during two trips to Mumbai’s so-called Thieves’ Market (Chor Bazaar) in 2005 and 2007. Never intended for exhibition, or to be seen as a collective whole, the examination papers are gathered together here for their first public display. Each and every representation shows the same scene: a figure walking away from the viewer down a wide straight road under a pale blue sky. Equivalent, but again varying in small ways, the overall image is of multiple interpretations of a single moment frozen in time.
D.B. makes apparent Blamey’s critique of fixed notions of creative autonomy by eschewing self-categorization from within an art-world premised on specialization and signature aesthetics. Describing his practice as being engaged with “the idea that the distance between the art world and the real world can be almost nothing” and with the work evolving from a process of “framing, adjusting, assisting, promoting, thinking-about and reassessing what’s already there”, Blamey’s methods echo Douglas Heubler’s maxim that “the world is more or less full of objects, more or less interesting — I do not wish to add to them”.
Blamey’s guiding principal that the stuff we have at our disposal is already complicated enough without adding anything more therein converges with his observation that our perception of the world can never meet our understanding of it. His projects often pivot on this dialectical tension between things that are so familiar that they have become almost invisible and ideals that are somehow always out of reach. This struggle to simply understand is often informed by an interest in belief systems from parallel fields of cultural production, whether it is the spiritual movement, popular science or, in this instance, in considering the art world as a debatable social sub-system in and of itself. D.B. therefore is an exhibition that resists any resolution that a normative solo show may purport to offer. Instead it endeavours to better understand those very impulses that lead us towards any such attempted conclusion.
